Back in 1991, I heard about a movie called The Dark Backward. In this movie, Judd Nelson plays a garbage man that moonlights as an unfunny stand-up comic. His act career as a comic picks up a little when he grows a third arm out of his back. How would I not be interested in this movie? Is it a surprise that this film didn’t see a wide release? It went to video soon after it was released and developed a cult following.
I was at work when I received a call from home. I talked to my wife for a little while and then my oldest daughter wanted to talk to me. She was about 4 years old at the time. We didn’t talk very long. As we wrapped up our conversation, she said, “Daddy, do you know what I want to watch when you get home?” I said “What” and she replied, “The Hideous Sun Demon.”
The movie Frogs was released on my birthday in 1972 when I was turning 10 years old. I didn’t see it during its original release. But I remember seeing commercials for it on TV and ads in the newspaper. All the ads for the movie featured a frog with a human hand hanging out of the mouth. This ad campaign has to be one of the all-time best for a movie. The movie isn’t as good as the advertising, but it is a fun nature-gone-wild movie. I probably saw it for the first time on TV on a channel that had a creature feature time slot. I liked it from the very first time I saw it, but I have come to love it over the years.
I loved watching television game shows in the early 1970’s. In 1972, CBS started showing The Price is Right, starring Bob Barker. This was an updated version of a successful show from nearly a decade earlier. Contestants guessed the prices of various products and some of the prizes they could win. I enjoyed seeing the attractive models who posed with the products being promoted. My favorite model was Anitra Ford. I found out a few years after this series started that Anitra Ford also appeared in several movies around the same time she was on The Price is Right. I would not see most of these until many years later. My favorite that had her in a primary role is Invasion of the Bee Girls.
Back in the early 1980’s, I discovered the Golden Turkey Awards books and my search for bad movies began. It was also around that time that video stores began popping up. Before the days of Blockbuster Video, it seemed like you could go to these smaller video stores and find many of these Golden Turkey award winners if you were willing to search hard enough. Those stores were looking for any kind of content to fill their shelves and these stinker movies were often just the right thing to pad their number of movies. For someone like me who loved these movies, a film with the title The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies was a must find.
Anyone hardcore fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 should be familiar with the film Manos: The Hands of Fate. Manos is considered one of the worst films that ever appeared on the series. The premise of the show is that mad scientists have captured a test case and show him bad movies. The test subject and his robots make fun of the movies. Manos was the only film that was so bad, the scientists apologized to their victim. It is also considered one of the best episodes of the series.
During the early 200’s, my family and I discovered a new group of bad movies. This group of movies was labeled as “so bad they are good” to differentiate them from the films labeled as Golden Turkeys in the past. One of the first of this group was a Film called Troll 2.
While I won’t try to share all the details of Troll 2, I will try and share enough to let you know why this film is so beloved by its fans. First, there are no trolls in Troll 2. There are goblins but no trolls. Next you should know that Troll 2 is not a sequel to the film Troll. Troll 2 was originally titled Goblins, but the distributors wanted to market it as a sequel to Troll. The movie was filmed by an Italian production company in Utah with an Italian-speaking crew, working with an inexperienced English-speaking group of actors. They were working with a script written in Italian and poorly translated into English, making the dialogue of the film one of the sources of humor.
In 1982 the film It Came From Hollywood was released. It is a documentary film with a compilation of clips from “Bad Movies” drawing heavily on the book The Golden Turkey Awards. There is a short clip of a film not covered in the book that I was unfamiliar with that featured a giant ape being attacked by helicopters. The man in the ape suit is slapping around toy helicopters on strings, knocking them into paper mache mountains. This was a low budget version Korean knock-off of what the Japanese had been doing much better for years with the Godzilla series. The highlight from the clip of this battle is when the ape flips the bird at the camera. He’s not flipping off the military, he’s flipping off the audience.
A lot of the time when people hear the title of the movie The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant, people think you are talking about The Thing with Two Heads. The Thing with Two Heads was the film that gets more attention and is more familiar to the general public. But The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant has its own two-headed monster movie thing going own that you can argue make it just as entertaining or maybe even more. The absence of any known actors as either of the heads of the monster is probably the reason this film gets less attention. But having Bruce Dern as a mad scientist more than makes up for it.
On the June 28, 1969, episode of The Rosey Grier Show, he sang a cover version of the Temptations song Get Ready. Around that same time, I was in the audience at a telethon in Jackson, Tennessee where saw Rosey Grier perform the song live. I really liked his performance of the song, and I didn’t realize that anyone else had ever recorded it. I also didn’t know that Rosey had ever played football. I thought he was primarily famous for singing. I never thought that an ex-football player would be the host of his own variety show. By the time I saw commercials for The Thing with Two Heads, I knew he had played football and was into needlepoint. From the looks of the commercials, I thought this would be a fun film to see.